The instant invention relates to systems and methods for triggering the actuation of vehicle safety devices and, more particularly, to systems and methods which integrate or accumulate received physical information to obtain one or more measures with which to detect conditions requiring actuation of the safety device thereby to provide superior response to a wider variety of crash scenarios.
A variety of systems and methods for actuating vehicle safety devices are well known in the art. Such systems are used to sense a crash condition and, in response to such a condition, to actuate an air bag, or lock a seat belt, or actuate a pretensioner for a seat belt retractor. Typically, the safety device is actuated into its protective position when an impact exceeding a predetermined magnitude is detected by the actuating system.
Significantly, known systems and methods for actuating vehicle safety devices rely on changes in one or more estimated physical quantities or "measures" in determining whether to actuate the safety device, e.g., a vehicle velocity measure estimated by integrating or accumulating received vehicle acceleration information over time. A sliding window is typically used so as to include only the last n values of vehicle acceleration information when determining these measures. As a result, these methods suffer from what might best be described as a "memory" problem--for example, once an additional n values for temporal vehicle acceleration have been proffered by an accelerometer, the previous "nth+1" vehicle acceleration value will no longer be used in determining a temporal value for the measure, whether that "nth+1" value was itself extreme, equivocal or insignificant.
An alternative approach of known systems and methods is to start a timer when a minimum threshold value for a particular measure has been exceeded, whereafter the measure must also exceed a maximum threshold value before the timer runs out in order to trigger actuation of the safety device. Should the timer run out before the maximum threshold value is exceeded, the system resets and the analysis begins again.
What is needed is a system and method for actuating a vehicle passenger safety device which utilizes one or more time-varying measures, themselves functions of received physical information such as received vehicle acceleration information or transitory passenger position information, wherein the effect of older received physical information is gradually rather than abruptly eliminated from the measures, thereby providing a kind of "memory" of past received physical information serving to enhance responsiveness to a wider variety of crash conditions.